I Deliver Parcels in Beijing (2023) by Hu Anyan

 Book Review

I Deliver Parcels in Beijing (2023)

by Hu Anyan

Translated by Jack Hargreaves

    Years of Chinese lessons on Duolingo have brought me no closer to my goal of someday speaking Chinese, but it is an interesting hobby and certainly a better way to spend my screen time than watching TikTok's about buying giant industrial machines from Asia.   It has certainly given me a great deal of respect both for native speakers of the language and Chinese speakers who have learned English.  The major issue with Chinese is that there is no alphabet and no letters, only thousands and thousands of characters.  Each character represents a syllable, so in that sense, Chinese is easier than Western languages.  Assuming you know the character and the corresponding sound there is little that can go wrong.  Getting to that point is the hard part.

  As translator Jack Hargreaves explains in his introduction, translating Chinese prose into English presents complexities in that the literal translation of Chinese characters into English words inevitably dulls the poetics in a way that translating from one Western language to another simply does not.  On the other hand, the contemporary China depicted in I Deliver Parcels in Beijing is so close to life in a city like New York, Toronto or Chicago that potential confusions are mitigated. 

   The title is a little misleading in that the Author/protagonist's stint delivering packages in Beijing is one chapter in a longer narrative about a rootless young man struggling to find his place in contemporary China.   As the book progresses, the reader learns that the narrator has some familiarity with the western literary tradition and a desire to evoke some of the artistic traditions of the west- specifically the Kuntslerroman.   Perhaps it has something to do with my prejudice and ignorance of Chinese culture that I would expect the author to actually be what the title claims he is.

  

Trampoline (2015) by Robert Gipe

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Trampoline (2015)

by Robert Gipe

Cumberland Mountains, Kentucky

Kentucky: 11/16

   Another day, another coming of age novel about a teen girl growing up in difficult circumstances in an underprivileged American community.   One theme I've noticed about character in novels set in the rural south is the almost utter absence of any desire to escape one's surroundings.  Most likely that comes from the difficult/oppositional relationship many of these characters have towards formal education, even the smart ones.  The idea that a young, smart character living in rural poverty might reject advancement through education in favor of wallowing in the human misery of their surroundings is a strange one to me.  Before the 1,001 Novels I thought the idea of using formal education as a means of escape was essentially universal in the United States, but such is not the case.  It's not the case thus far in Kentucky, and it mostly was not the case in the deep south: Mississippi and Alabama in particular.

   Here, our teenage protagonist shuttles between her addiction adjacent mother and environmental activity grandmother who is focused on defeating the permit of a mining company to "de-top" a nearby mountain, a controversial stance considering the number of people who are employed by said mining company in the local community.  Gipe does a good job capturing the tumultuous inner life of an adolescent girl, but seriously are there any other types of adolescent girl in ya lit?